Category: Coronapanic

Uber stands with the Black community

by philg

Judging by the contents of my inbox, America is truly the land of goodwill and brotherhood. A typical recent example has a subject line of “Uber stands with the Black community”:

I wish that the lives of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and countless others weren’t so violently cut short. I wish that institutional racism, and the police violence it gives rise to, didn’t cause their deaths. I wish that all members of our Black community felt safe enough to move around their cities without fear. I wish that I didn’t have to try to find the words to explain all of this to my two young sons.

But I’ve been given hope this week by hundreds of thousands of peaceful protestors demanding change. I am committed to being part of that change.

We know this isn’t enough. It won’t be enough until we see true racial justice. But we plan to work day in and day out to improve, learn, and grow as a company.

Dara Khosrowshahi
CEO

(From the fact that riots and looting give him hope, I think it is safe to infer that he’s explaining everything to his two young sons while safely enroute in the family Gulfstream from fenced airport to fenced airport.)

The Uber Diversity and Inclusion Report for 2019 shows that standing with the Black community can be done by “tech leaders” who are 51 percent white and 47.5 percent Asian (“Black of African American” people hold 0.8 percent of these jobs; “Hispanic or Latinx” are also at 0.8 percent).

Readers: What would Travis Kalanick have written about recent events?

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Post-coronaplague world of employment will be even less friendly to older workers?

by philg

All of my friends in the new work-from-home economy say that coworkers with newly unskooled children to manage are “useless”. Employers who fire their least productive employees, therefore, in an age-neutral manner, may actually be firing an older-than-average population (and, coincidentally, saving a ton of money on employer-provided health care for both these older adults and their children!).

I’m wondering if the new “wear a mask 8 hours/day” policies will also winnow the older workers out of the U.S. labor force. Older people have reduced lung capacity and muscular strength compared to the young, so they are going to be more impaired by the masks. Already in retail stores I have noticed some older workers struggling and, in some cases, wearing the mask around their necks, even when interacting fairly closely with customers.

Finally, you have the actual risk of coronaplague. As workers get closer to the average age of a Covid-19-tagged death (82 in Massachusetts), they might not want to take the risk of coming into contact with a lot of co-workers, customers, etc.

Related:

  • The Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 (EEOC): “The ADEA prohibits employment discrimination against persons 40 years of age or older.” (i.e., employers wouldn’t hire people over 40 without the threat of lawsuits and coercion by the government)
  • “Lung Capacity and Aging” (American Lung Association): “Your lungs mature by the time you are about 20-25 years old. After about the age of 35, it is normal for your lung function to decline gradually as you age. This can make breathing slightly more difficult as you get older.”
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Urban riots predictable after lockdown?

by philg

Loyal readers of this blog (i.e., both of you!) will recall that I have regularly asked whether the lockdown cure is worse than the coronavirus disease. I anticipated deaths in the U.S. due to the shutdown of health care for non-Covid issues, due to poverty and unemployment, due to the shutdown of clinical trials for new/improved medicines, and due to the shutdown of clinical training for medical doctors (post). I anticipated a vast number of deaths in poor countries that were our trading partners.

I did not anticipate civil unrest and the destruction of American cities, but of course in hindsight it seems obvious that locking the poorest Americans into their crummy tiny urban apartments for months, while taking away jobs from most of those who formerly worked, would lead to them eventually emerging and entertaining themselves in ways that wouldn’t be entertaining for the mansion-dwelling governors who ordered the lockdowns. (see “Your lockdown may vary”)

Police departments in the U.S. murder citizens on a regular basis (and why not, since they are generally immune from being fired). The typical police murder does not bother too many Americans or even make the news. This one was unusually disturbing and unusually thoroughly documented on video, of course, but I still don’t think it would have been enough to trigger nationwide riots back in, say, 2019.

In addition to the lockdown itself having put non-mansion-dwelling Americans into a bad mood, I wonder if the lockdown created a general environment of lawlessness. Unlike in Sweden, for example, Americans were told that everything had changed due to the killer virus and therefore their Constitutional rights were inoperative. Since the old laws didn’t apply to the government, maybe the old laws against looting didn’t apply to the subjects?

Is it fair to say that a lot of Americans actually did anticipate this kind of breakdown of society? There was a huge run on guns and ammo back in March, right? I discovered that several of my friends had become new gun owners. These included female physicians in their 40s, for example, living alone in cities. I scoffed at them, saying that the militarized U.S. police state would keep the ghetto-dwellers quietly imprisoned, watching TV while consuming alcohol and opioids purchased via Medicaid.

Readers: Were these riots easy to foresee?

Bonus: Some pictures from a recent helicopter trip over Dover, Massachusetts. #WeAreAllinThisTogether #StayHomeSaveLives

(The house is at 36 Farm Street. Trulia says that the annual property tax is $141,000 per year, i.e., not enough to pay the pension for one retired senior police officer or school administrator. It may belong to Kevin Rollins, former CEO of Dell.)

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How is Russia doing with coronaplague?

by philg

A couple of previous posts about coronaplague and Russia:

How is Russia doing according to the official WHO reports? Do we think that they will end up doing better than the U.S. when the first full year of the plague is over?

Related:

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Jet pilot hero considers returning to the Air Force Reserve

by philg

A friend used to be a military hero flying an exotic airplane for the U.S. Air Force. Due to the airline industry boom, a lot of pilots retired during the past few years, but now the Air Force hopes to get some back, at least part time, for the Reserve. A recruiter called. Here were the first three questions:

  1. What was your sex at birth?
  2. What pronouns do you use now?
  3. Have you tested positive for Covid-19?
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Making $200/hour on the coronapanic front line

by philg

Text from a pilot:

A good friend’s daughter works at a local restaurant in summer breaks from college. They called her up and offered her $40 an hour to come and hand out the take out orders because they could not get anyone employed full time before to show up until unemployment runs out. She ended up making $800 for one shift because the guilty-conscience of the Wellesley Elite was tipping her $20 for each bag of food she brought to their Mercedes while saying “Thank you for your front line service”.

Now that the summer heat is upon us and wearing a mask will become more uncomfortable, what will be the additional wage that employers will have to pay to entice workers into these jobs where hours of mask use is required?

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Norwegian government admits that lockdown was a mistake

by philg

“Norway health chief: lockdown was not needed to tame Covid” (Spectator):

the Norwegian public health authority has published a report with a striking conclusion: the virus was never spreading as fast as had been feared and was already on the way out when lockdown was ordered. ‘It looks as if the effective reproduction rate had already dropped to around 1.1 when the most comprehensive measures were implemented on 12 March, and that there would not be much to push it down below 1… We have seen in retrospect that the infection was on its way down.’ Here’s the graph, with the R-number on the right-hand scale:

Camilla Stoltenberg, director of Norway’s public health agency, has given an interview where she is candid about the implications of this discovery. ‘Our assessment now, and I find that there is a broad consensus in relation to the reopening, was that one could probably achieve the same effect – and avoid part of the unfortunate repercussions – by not closing. But, instead, staying open with precautions to stop the spread.’

Norway’s statistics agency was also the first in the world to calculate the permanent damage inflicted by school closures: every week of classroom education denied to students, it found, stymies life chances and permanently lowers earnings potential. So a country should only enforce this draconian measure if it is sure that the academic foundation for lockdown was sound. And in Stoltenberg’s opinion, ‘the academic foundation was not good enough’ for lockdown this time.

I am not expecting too many other governments to admit that they panicked and made a mistake by shutting down just as the virus was about to fade out mostly by itself.

Related:

  • “Reopening schools in Denmark did not worsen outbreak, data shows” (Reuters): “You cannot see any negative effects from the reopening of schools,” Peter Andersen, doctor of infectious disease epidemiology and prevention at the Danish Serum Institute said on Thursday told Reuters. In Finland, a top official announced similar findings on Wednesday, saying nothing so far suggested the coronavirus had spread faster since schools reopened in mid-May.
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American courts during the Coronashutdown

by philg

People sometimes ask how work as an expert witness (mostly in software patent cases, but also in some aviation matters) is going during the coronashutdown. I tell them that things are slow and deadlines are typically pushed back by six months because most courts have shut down except for emergencies, though sometimes hearings will be held via Zoom. “The Chinese must be laughing their asses off when they see how Americans spend their time,” was one response to this news.

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Train Americans to use masks the way that surgeons do or restructure the physical environment?

by philg

My Facebook feed is packed with the Masked Faithful expressing their outrage at fellow U.S. residents’ incompetence. Examples:

Ran into Meijer today – only about 1/2 the people were wearing masks, and maybe 25% of them weren’t wearing them correctly. A 12% success rate won’t help, folks. … [details on how stupid everyone else is] #communityspread #covidiots PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE send an emergency notification text to everybody’s cell phone. This is important.

[from a Manhattan elite] The last ten people I saw: every single one with his mask under his nose. One with his mask under his chin. Why bother?

I responded to the last one with “The dream of the technocrats encounters the real-world American.” One of her friends reasonably asked “So, how do we fix this? If people genuinely won’t follow directions about masks and distancing, etc. (and it does seem more and more likely that they either can’t or won’t), what’s the solution?”

My answer:

that is a great question! I think it is probably smarter to reconfigure stuff physically. Take out half the shelves in a Target for example, so that people are naturally farther apart. With so many other retailers shutting down, there is plenty of mall space.

switch small retail to more like it was in the 18th century. Customer enters spacious front part of shop and asks for item. Shopkeeper goes into jammed back part shelves to retrieve requested item.

make it illegal to sell the middle seat on an airliner except to a family group instead of relying on people to use masks properly (which includes never touching one’s mask) during a 6-hour flight.

in states with warmer weather, build a lot of big shade structures so that more things can be done outdoors rather than indoors. Add some warming lamps in the ceiling to extend the useful season.

The current situation seems a bit like observing that there are a lot of car accidents and planning to reduce them with more intensive driver training. In fact, the solution that has been found to work all over the world is re-engineering the road system so that the humans that we have are less likely to crash. (Dividing busy roads, for example, to eliminate the possibility of head-on collisions for most of the miles that people travel.)

Readers: What do you think? Re-engineer Americans or re-engineer the American physical environment so that people are naturally more separated? Besides the above, what else could we do?

[My own Karen moment: I was in a big box store on Saturday. It was jammed and there were long lines for anything requiring human assistance now that people have discovered they can earn more on unemployment than by working. The City of Waltham requires masks for everyone, said a sign at the carefully policed front door. Once inside, I observed an interaction between a store worker roughly age 60 who was wearing a mask…. around his neck, and a shopper in his 30s, nowhere near 6′ away, who was seeking help from him. The shopper had his hand on his mask to pull it away from his nose and mouth (leaving the nose completely uncovered) to make it easier to talk.]

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What happens to classical musicians in the Age of Corona?

by philg

The audience for live classical music and opera is perilously close to the 82-year-old average age of a Covid-19 victim in Massachusetts (source). Concert venues are shut down by orders of the governor, First Amendment right to assemble notwithstanding. Even if it were legal to host a concert, would the core of elderly patrons show up?

This means that classical music and opera must be experienced via recordings and/or live audio/video streams. But what is the market for a new performance of Carmen or Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony? If you’re going to sit at home and watch it on a screen, why it is better to experience a 2020 performance of an 18th or 19th century work than a 1995, 2006, or 2017 performance that was recorded?

With pop music, it makes sense that we could have a market for new performances. People would pay to hear a new song by Kanye West, performed by Kanye West. They don’t just want to listen to “Gold Digger” over and over. Pop musicians should be able to do roughly as well as the movie industry, i.e., by selling tickets to people watching from home.

Classical music and opera depend on donations and ticket sales tied to live performance. Due to high costs under union agreements, American orchestras have typically lost money on recordings. Even if the governor of Massachusetts and his License Raj would permit the Boston Symphony Orchestra to assemble long enough to make a recording, how could that possibly yield enough revenue to keep the institution going? Who is going to donate to an enterprise that is not legal to operate?

Maybe the institutions that have streaming services, such as the Metropolitan Opera and the ever-entrepreneurial musician-owned London Symphony Orchestra, can continue to exist. But what about the average player who would ordinarily be playing in the average city orchestra?

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